Starship Titanic

Review

by Nick Smith

Imagine this: You're making your breakfast when suddenly a spaceship crashes through your roof and into your living room. A strange being invites you aboard and, being curious, you wander into the craft. You enter a plush, hotel-like lobby inside the vessel, which then takes off into space with you inside.

This interactive adventure offers everything you'd expect from a state-of-the-art computer game. The sounds and music are stunning and even mesmerizing at times. The graphics have depth and are almost hypnotic. The interior of the spaceship is based on the Ritz-Carlton (rather than the USS Enterprise), with flowing water, acres of polished marble, grand staircases, and massive restaurants. In all, there are 26 different rooms to explore.

The player moves around the ship by moving the mouse from left to right. When the cursor is over a point of interest, it changes to offer a close-up view, allow access to a different room, or begin a puzzle game. There are a number of bizarre puzzles to complete throughout the adventure, such as recording "musak" tracks to be played in the starship's first-class restaurant.

It should be mentioned that the Starship Titanic is populated by a fleet of dysfunctional robots, known as 'Bots', as well as a deranged parrot. Part of your mission is to restore the ship's 'sanity' by piecing together the ship's intelligence, "Titania," which has been deliberately sabotaged.

A big part of the enjoyment in this game comes in conversing with the 'Bots.' They understand an amazing array of concepts and phrases, which the player enters in text form. In fact, over 16 hours of vocal clips were recorded for the robots. This diligence allows for believable conversations and makes the game an extremely satisfying experience.

Starship Titanic is an intelligent game that forces the player to think laterally. It can be very a challenging, but it's always user-friendly, visually impressive, and very, very funny.